


Humbug

by scullywolf



Series: TXF: Scenes in Between [44]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 14:55:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4670909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scullywolf/pseuds/scullywolf





	Humbug

He generally prided himself on having an open mind. After years spent in the Behavioral Science Unit and his work on the X-Files, he considered himself pretty difficult to shock. He had seen gruesome things, bizarre things, unexplainable things, and impossible things. He’d come face to face with shape-shifting aliens, improbable lifeforms, horrifically violent psychopaths, spectral phenomena, and military projects so secret he’d had his memory wiped after witnessing them. All of that and more, he’d seen, processed, and accepted without freaking out or shutting down.

But as he stood gasping at the end of his run and watched a man with a full-body tattoo and a loincloth drag a fish out of a shallow creek -- in his mouth -- and proceed to tear into it while crouching on the bank, Mulder found himself legitimately and unquestionably shocked.

His stomach turned, and he must have groaned involuntarily, because the man suddenly noticed him standing there, dropped the fish, and fled over the scrubby hill in the direction of the trailer park, his loincloth flapping behind him. Mulder spared half a second’s worry for Scully before shaking his head. All of the murders had occurred under cover of darkness. Even if the tattooed man were responsible for them, he was highly unlikely to strike in broad daylight. After Mulder had a shower and a change of clothes, he would see what he could do to track down the man at the camp, keep an eye on him if nothing else.

The wind shifted, bringing the low-tide stench up from the shallow waterway, and his stomach heaved again. It would be a faster route back to the trailer park if he followed the man he could still glimpse scrambling over the top of the hill, but Mulder turned and started off quickly in the opposite direction, wanting to put as much distance between him and the half-eaten fish on the ground, before his breakfast could make a reappearance.  



End file.
